1945. Somewhere in North-East China occupied by Japanese army, a little village near the Great Wall. One night, Ma Dasan (Jiang Wen) and Yu'er (Jiang Hongbo) his mistress and young widow, are disturbed in the middle of making love by a (some ?) unexpected visitor(s). Ma Dasan, with a submachine gun pointed to his head is so frightened that he keeps his eyes closed, doesn't see anything and hears nothing but a (Chinese) male voice calling himself "Me", leaving him two bags he will take back one week later. In the meantime, Ma Dasan must extract "confession"... Once the man faded into the night, Ma Dasan and Yu'er find in the bags two men, two prisoners. The first one is a sergeant in the Japanese imperial Army, Kosaburo Hanaya  (Teruyuki Kagawa), the second a  Chinese "collaborator" and interpreter, Dong Hanchen (Yuan Ding)… 
Ma Dasan calls the village men together, all as afraid as he is. What to do ? After a pseudo-interrogation with the interpreter systematically changing the Japanese's abusive words (who wishes to be killed) in compliments, the decision is taken to keep the prisoners secret, safe from the local Japanese garrison... But  nobody comes and takes them away at the end of the week... Six months later, the prisoners are still there and the question is what to do with them ? To kill them seems to be the only viable answer. But Ma Dasan  who drew lots for this mission is unable to do it. A Chinese imperial regime's former executioner, hired for doing the job, fails too. Then an idea forms in the Japanese's brain (who's starting to enjoy life again): he, exchanged for grains bags. The idea is adopted by the villagers who take him back to his regiment...

MY OPINION

Six years after his first film as a director, the beautiful "In the Heat of the Sun" (Huanggang cuanlan de rizi, 1994), China's biggest actor Jiang Wen shot his second feature: DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP which was awarded the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes Festival (2000).
Two films in six years: two masterpieces ! After the dazzling beautiful revelation, the sumptuous confirmation.

The first striking thing in DEVILS... is the aesthetic bias, in perfect contrast to the In the Heat of the Sun's. When his first film showed beautiful colours and ended with a black and white epilogue, this one unfolds in a gorgeous black and white before coming to an end in... an amazing coloured sequence !

With DEVILS... Jiang Wen goes back further in time than what he did with his former film. To his memories of teenage years and Cultural Revolution, he substitutes a collective memory, not personally lived but a real national trauma: the war's one, the Japanese atrocities done in his country but also the sometimes ambiguous behaviour of Chinese people, between resignation, submission, collaboration and a resistance heightened in PRC's History textbooks but not shown very much in the film.
DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP is terribly pessimistic in spite of its farcical appearance which regularly busts out and makes us roar with laughter. Jiang Wen shows us the horror and absurdity of war, the tragic consequences resulting from fear, incomprehension and an exacerbated sense of honour (on the Japanese side mainly).
More we laugh in front of this film, more we are filled with the certainty that everything will end in pure tragedy.
We won't be deceived.

Jiang Wen builds his film around a double theme: enclosing and incomprehension, both complementing and increasing each other all the time through an uncanny and scary dialectic.

Enclosing:

The film starts almost like an Italian comedy shot on location. A little ridiculous Japanese military brass band is parading along a coast curiously looking Mediterranean. The officer on his horse is an handsome hunk, he smiles and distributes candies to Chinese children. But this amusing and repetitive image of a brass band in open air proves to be quickly very deceptive. Actually the whole film will focus on interiors, whether they are physical or mental.
Enclosing in the dark houses from where nobody dares to go out, enclosing of the two prisoners in the cave then in the Great Wall (which can be seen itself as not only remparts protecting against the outside but also as a prison wall), enclosing of Yu'er in a wood chest in order to avoid to be caught in her extra-marrital relationship with Ma Dasan...
That's it for the physical aspect...
For the mental, the enclosing of men and women unable to get away from fear, a fear surfing on concentric circles's crest, gripping and stifling the people so tightly like a garrotte... Fear of the village community (the gossips feared by Ma Dasan and Yu'er), of the Japanese invader, of the future victorious Chinese authority. Fear of the present as much as of the future. A paralytic fear, always. One step forward, two steps back. Caught in the crossfire, the fear not to please the mysterious and supposed terrible "Me" goes against the fear to unleash the Japanese repression.
The characters are also enclosed in the darkness which reigns supreme over the interiors where there is no electricity and where only oil-lamps shine, casting disturbing shadows (and allowing beautiful close-ups on faces, I shoud say mugs !). Here, Jiang Wen only remembered his own childhood: "There was no electricity in the villages and the people used small oil lamps. That was strange for a young child to see them moving in this light, it was frightening and  it was quickly phantasmagoric. I was in a universe full of people dressed in black hardly standing out of the walls as black as themselves. I was living in a world made of shadows and I had a feeling (I was five or six years old) that their heads were floating in the air. It is that feeling that I wanted to convey, hence the pictures in black and white." [Jiang Wen, 14/03/2001].
To escape this terror and this feeling of confinement, absurd logic they don't understand and even more so they can't control, the villagers think again and again. But "more you think, more you are mistaken, often without knowing where you did the mistake" [Jiang Wen, id.].

The fear of the unknown encloses them in themselves and in behaviours that are never  the right ones, the judicious ones (because they never can be).
The two prisoners themselves are no exception to the rule. Hanaya, the Japanese, is bound to his military code which makes him wish death rather than disgrace, and hurl insults at his "hosts" rather than searching to be on good terms with them. That could be called "Syndrom of Absurd Honour ". Dong Hanchen, the interpreter, is enclosed in his logic of collaboration but is also driven by the instinct of self-preservation. He tries to "surf" between these two poles through his "invented" translations, trying to earn his jailers's respect as well as the Japanese's trust. And the most hilarious scenes of the film have their origins in his attitude. More the Japanese bawls his insults, more Dong translates and turns them into kind words. The gap between the Japanese's anger and the villagers's benevolent smiles gives the film its most comic scene, an essential part of the genre blend in which the whole film is steeped in.
The Japanese officer himself doesn't escape from this enclosing, this time an ideological one and which will make him refuse the possible fraternity between occupied and occupying forces at the last minute, and will lead him to chose the massacre, the slaughter.

Incomprehension:

Enclosing of bodies and minds but also incomprehension of people each to other. Everything begins with language. Chinese and Japanese don't speak the same language, how could they understand each others ? Particularly when the only person able to fill the gap (the interpreter) refuses to do it, even if this "deceit" choice is the one which allows the two prisoners to stay alive such a long time and postpone then the inevitable.
But even Chinese don't understand each others. Ma Dasan received his two bags from a Chinese (probably a Resistance fighter). But this mysterious man, this "Me" whose face Ma Dasan coudn't see, left orders that no villager is sure to interpret in the correct way. Mainly this matter of "confession" to get out from the prisoners: confessions about what and who for ?
The villagers meetings are dedicated to nothing else but that: trying to understand, to decipher the orders, the mission the whole community has been invested with, through the intermediary of Ma Dasan.
But once the language problem solved (the interpreter respecting this time the comments exchanged at the banquet), incomprehension will reappear in another form: the gestural attitude.
The undue familiarity shown by drunken Chinese who takes a lot of liberties with the Japanese officer, tapping him on the back, will be resent by him as an insult and will help to his hardening. In the same way, the child's behaviour, first innocent victim of the slaughter, will be taken as a provocation and will trigger the violence off...

Those two themes (enclosing and incomprehension) are found, tightly linked, in the long final scene, the purge's. The Chinese Nationalist Army's officer (Chang Kai-chek's and Guo Min-tang's), winner of the war, "sticks" to his mission, his regulations and his propagandist speech without being able to escape it while the two US allied and observing soldiers in his back, probably not understanding a single word and caring little about it (they likely think: "let those "chinks" sort it out together"), yawning widely and chewing their gums.
 

DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP is a very great film, mixing the genres in the best shakespearian tradition and, watching it, we can't help ourselves thinking about Stratford-upon-Avon playwright's world. Akira Kurosawa's (great shakespearian himself) or Kon Ichikawa's names were also mentioned, not without reason. Maybe more surprisingly, I'll add Fellini's, or even on a formal level Eisenstein 's or Welles 's (another shakespearian…). But all that is not very important since Jiang Wen shows a genuine originality. His film takes bets on intelligence and humanism by denouncing the human stupidity, the cowardness and the absurdity of the war. But at the same time he perfectly knows that  human soul is much more compicated than that and even if his film is in black and white, there is no manicheism here. Every character (none is "sacrified" by Jiang Wen) has his share of humanity (what can be more human than fear, anyway ?), even if it is more present in some like Ma Dasan and Yu'er (we can regret that she hasn't been more developed)...

The devils are everywhere and therefore on the doorsteps. The Imperial Japanese Army, shown in its all 
barbarity in a candid portrait (with the consequence to make the 2000 Japan angry) is of course the big chief devil the Chinese population suffered so much from. But the latter is not cleared of all suspicion for all that. Jiang Wen puts it face to face to its own inner and terrible devils. From here came the problems met by the Chinese actor and director for the exploitation of his film in his own country and his troubles with censorship (and whose exact consequences are not known yet today). It is for sure that Beijing authorities didn't appreciate to see the official "credo"in force for 50 years (all China fighting, united, against the Japanese invader) reassessed by one of its most famous and beloved artist.
We, French, can understand very well this shock if we remember how a film like "Lacombe Lucien" (Louis Malle) provoked a turmoil when released in 1974, destroying the myth of a whole resistant France against the Nazis...

DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP is a beautiful work, even a masterpiece and I don't know what we must glorify best, the content or the form. A film that leaves you shaked and knocked out. Jiang Wen confirms how a very great director he is. Maybe he will become the greatest soon. I'll add that he doesn't forget to give a big performance as an actor, superbly supported by a perfect casting, each actor, physically unforgettable, playing at the same time in a natural and expressionist way...

One last word to emphasize the strength of the final sequence with this unexpected intrusion of colour, dominated by a blood red about which I won't say more for not spoiling the end of the film. And I envy you who will discover it for the first time. Because doing it is such a strong experience that I can do nothing but regret not to be able (by definition) to do it again...

Copyright Philippe Serve 2001.